


a bit beside himself

by sternenrotz



Category: The Horrors (Band)
Genre: Awkward Conversations, Caught, Domestic, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Self-cest, Threesome - M/M/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-17
Updated: 2013-06-17
Packaged: 2017-12-15 05:38:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/845934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sternenrotz/pseuds/sternenrotz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Rhys says, “oh my god.”</i><br/><i>He looks back and forth between the two Joes sitting on the sofa. The one with the black hair looks roughly as dumbfounded as he feels right now, the brown haired one more concerned than anything. If he didn't know any better, Rhys would say that he's having a really bad trip.</i> </p><p>Joe drinks himself forward in time. or, Rhys comes home to his boyfriend making out with himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a bit beside himself

**Author's Note:**

> the working title for this was _rhys and joe are gay. also selfcest.txt_

So, the day it all starts is a pretty normal day. Normal, save for the absolutely terrible weather outside, pissing down and freezing cold, but then, this is London. Rhys has seen worse. Even considering the fact that it's May.

Still, when he enters the flat with jingling keys and a heavy plastic bag filled with groceries in each hand, Rhys' first instinct is to rip his sopping wet jacket off and wander into the bathroom in search of a towel. He dries himself off, as good as he can, while also cursing at himself under his breath for making an awful mess of the floorboards, and when he's done with that, Rhys reaches for his bags and ventures into the kitchen.

Normally, by this point, Joe would have already shown up and offered to help with the groceries, or at least he would have made fun of Rhys for looking like a soggy poodle, his hair curly with how wet it has gotten. The same jokes he's been making for ten years, which haven't been funny for roughly the same amount of time, but that's still preferable to being ignored.

(Rhys doesn't think he's done anything to piss Joe off lately. Honest. Okay, there was that incident last week when he'd used up the last of Joe's body wash in the shower, the stupidly expensive one that smells really good, but Joe is not the type to still be mad over that after a whole week. Over anything, really. When Joe gets mad at Rhys, he always spends an hour or so pouting about in his room, until one of them ends up apologising and then they have messy make-up sex on the nearest flat surface. The last time, it ended up being the kitchen counter.)

Rhys gives the two bags on the kitchen table a sceptical look. As if they're even going to eat all that food. He figures he might as well go find Joe and make him sort it into the cupboards and the fridge. It'd be a fair punishment for blatantly not acknowledging Rhys' existence, yes. Rhys hums something to himself, some tune he's been unable to get out of his head for the past few days, while he waits for the kettle to boil. He pours himself a cup of tea and makes his way to the living room, but when he gets the door open, he freezes.

On the couch, Joe has some kid in tight trousers pressed into the upholstery. One hand cupping the kid's cock through his clothes and the other stroking his hair, mouths mashed together, Joe's already all full and pink.

Honestly, Rhys reckons that he's known Joe for so long that he shouldn't be surprised by anything that he does any more. But he is. So surprised that for a moment, he forgets to react to this at all. The hand with the teacup shakes and most of it spills out onto the carpet. He'd been meaning to get it cleaned anyhow.

Joe does the reacting for him, at least. “Oh, fuck.”

The kid says, “what's going...” and at roughly that moment, Rhys starts functioning like a normal person again.

“What the fuck is this?”

Joe has the decency to sit up all the way and take his hand from the kid's dick. “Rhys, love, look. I can explain.” His voice is still freshly-snogged husky, a little bit giddy, and it doesn't sound all too genuine.

“Don't even,” Rhys starts.

It's not supposed to come out in that bitter, _don't bother, drawing my own conclusions_ , way. More in a way that the fact Joe had his tongue down the kid's throat moments earlier seems like the least of his problems now, because he's only now taken a good look at the kid.

Then Rhys says, “oh my god.”

He looks back and forth between the two Joes sitting on the sofa. The one with the black hair looks roughly as dumbfounded as he feels right now, the brown haired one more concerned than anything. If he didn't know any better, Rhys would say that he's having a really bad trip.

“I think I need to sit down.”

–

After maybe half an hour, after Joe – the older one – has made them all tea and after Rhys has calmed down enough to come to the conclusion that maybe, he's not completely insane, he calls Faris.

“Rhys? What is it?”

“Faris. Hey.” That's the easy part of the conversation. “Listen, I don't reckon we'll be able to get to the studio today.” Rhys takes a breath. “Joe's a bit. A bit beside himself.” For that, he gets a kick in the shin from the older Joe. From the end of the sofa farthest from Rhys, the younger one sniggers.

On the other end of the line, Faris says something, not into the phone, but into the room. Rhys thinks he can hear Tom and Josh laughing, and he absolutely does not want to know what is so funny. He's got a problem here, fuckssake.

“All right. Do you think you'll make it here tomorrow?”

“Yeah.” This other Joe doesn't seem all too sinister. Pretty much like the normal one, like his Joe, but younger. Can most likely be trusted to be left alone in their flat for a few hours. “So, tomorrow, then?”

“Tomorrow,” Faris says and hangs up, and that's that.

Rhys pockets his phone, and Joe gives him a look. “Should've phoned Josh instead. Maybe he would've known what to do.”

Now Rhys is the one who's giving Joe a weird look, which, he reckons, is entirely deserved.

“Well, he's a physicist. He probably knows all about that. Time-space continuum and those things.”

Honestly, Rhys is not the type of person who shuts up a lot. Ever. But now, now he's genuinely speechless because he literally can't fathom that Joe is spouting this nonsense. He looks at the other Joe's face, but that one mostly just seems bewildered.

“I'm going to call him,” Joe decides. He takes his phone from other Joe's hand, and Rhys just shakes his head. He reminds himself that Joe is and always has been a bloody idiot, and that's probably not going to change any time soon. It's interesting to watch, at the very least.

Earlier on, after that initial moment, other Joe had spent some minutes googling things about time travel, about randomly getting forwarded seven-odd years in time, and parallel universes and doppelgängers – other Joe insisted that he's the real one – and none of it had been particularly helpful. Then, the next few minutes while Rhys had still sipped his tea and tried to convince himself that this was actually happening, he'd spent doing... something. Playing stupid games and marvelling at technical developments, mostly. Rhys kind of hopes he didn't spend too much time going through Joe's – current Joe's – photos. There's some things in there of which he'd rather have that the rest of the world never gets to see them.

Current Joe puts the phone to his ear, after he's finally chosen Josh's number. (Joe spends a ridiculous amount of time when he calls people because he always insists on scrolling through his whole list of contacts. Rhys still isn't sure whether that's endearing or unnerving.)

“Put it on speaker phone,” Rhys insists. If Joe's about to make an idiot of himself, he might as well have some fun.

“You guys again?” Josh's voice comes tinny from the small phone speakers.

“Yeah. Me this time.” Joe coughs. “Listen, I've got a question. Since you're knowledgeable about physics and that.”

“Shoot.”

“Say if. If, hypothetically speaking, I was currently in the same room as my past self from eight years ago, what do you think would be the cause of that?”

A pause. Rhys gives Joe – the younger one, this time – a look of bemusement, and in return, gets a look of pure shock. This kid evidently has no idea what's even going on, and suddenly, Rhys feels so much worse for him, considering that the poor fuck just appeared here from 2005 for no apparent reason.

Through the phone, Josh laughs. That annoying laugh he's got, and he won't stop. To be fair, Rhys would be laughing too, because this whole scenario is kind of funny, except he's sitting on a sofa with more Joes than there should be, so instead, it all just borders on Kafkaesque.

“Josh?” the older Joe asks, reluctantly, and then, finally, Josh begins to settle down.

“Sorry about that. Doppelgänger, you were saying?”

“I was saying, if I came home one day and found my past self sleeping on my sofa, and it's not a fucked up dream or anything, what do you think that means?”

Josh makes a snorting noise. It's not the fully blown laughter at the very least. “It means you're insane.”

“It's a hypothetical question.”

“Means that you're hypothetically insane, then.”

“Josh.” This conversation is not going anywhere at all. If this is really not a fucked up dream or anything, to quote Joe, Rhys reminds himself to bring it up the next time Joe's been annoying him. “Can you at least try to see this whole scenario from a scientific viewpoint?”

“You're talking at the very least about a stable time loop and wormholes here. Maybe parallel universes. Pseudo science.”

“So what you're saying is it's not possible.”

“I'm saying that the idea is highly unlikely and that it doesn't sound like credible science.”

Rhys gives Joe, the main one, a look. The good old “told you so” look, and Joe scowls a bit.

“Well,” he says. “Then I guess it's mostly not possible. Remind me to call you again the next time I have a weird hypothetical question.”

Joe doesn't bother with waiting for Josh's reply before he hangs up. Then he laughs, kind of louder than the situation really allows, but Rhys laughs along either way.

“Well,” he says after a few seconds, “now Josh is going to think you're a weirdo.”

“He knows me. And I mean, he's Josh.”

“He's going to think you're a bigger weirdo.” Rhys reaches for his cup of tea on the table, but finds it to be already cold. He says, “I'm going to go make tea,” although, really, he's got the feeling that he'll need something much stronger than tea to get accustomed to. Well. All of this.

When the kettle is done boiling, and they're all drinking once more, Rhys figures that maybe he should bring the topic of this other Joe up once again. There's got to be some explanation for him being here, even if it's not the science-y one that Joe was looking for. “So,” Rhys starts.

“So,” older Joe repeats, and younger Joe just stares dumbfounded some more. He doesn't seem to talk much, but then, Rhys supposes he wouldn't be able to think of many things to say either if he'd been suddenly whisked into the future.

“So we still have no clue where the fuck he came from and why.”

“I'm right here, you know,” the other Joe says. “The last time I was awake I was in two thousand five. In Rhys' flat.”

“Yeah,” the main Joe adds, “you know, I actually remember something like that.” His voice has only dropped a little bit when compared to the nineteen year old version of him. It borders on being unsettling. “Rhys, you remember that party we had back then when I got so drunk that I passed out under the kitchen table?”

“Yeah.” Rhys wants to say that he has no clue where this conversation is going, but really, after all that has happened today already, he's got a vague idea.

“And then a week later I woke up in your bed.”

“Yeah,” Rhys says once again. He actually remembers that very well, well, the morning after when he woke up and had a minor freak out that he might have actually shagged his best mate, at least, because he's got no recollection whatsoever of the night before. It's one of those memories that get much funnier in retrospect.

“Well, I've got literally no memory of what had happened between those two points in time.” Joe shrugs like that somehow just explained everything.

Really, Rhys had had the feeling that he's slowly going insane before. Now, though, he is pretty sure that if he is insane, Joe is going insane right along with him. “You're not suggesting that you got so out of it you managed to drink yourself forward in time, right?”

Joe shrugs. “Why not. I mean, I've heard of weirder shit happening.”

The younger Joe continues to gaze at both of them with a bewildered look on his face. “So I'll be back where I came from in a week, then?”

“Suppose so,” the older Joe says.

“Okay.” Young Joe takes a breath. “Okay. I need a fag.”

Rhys just really needs a drink. “I need a bloody drink.”

–

As it turns out, the other Joe stops being quite as silent and awkward when he's drunk. And high on acid. Rhys puts on records, the crazy psychedelic stuff that makes him see colours, and then he watches young Joe lie back against the carpet with big eyes going, “what the fuck _is_ that,” and laughs at him. Maybe he slips in a Horrors song along the way, too, just for the sake of it.

“I think you're scaring him,” the normal Joe says after a while, “me.”

“You sound like a dad,” Rhys points out and laughs. “Like you're your own dad.”

“That's creepy,” young Joe says. He's opened up after the first few sips of whiskey, asked questions about how future things are going. (Regular Joe pointed out that he's got absolutely no memory of any of this having happened before, so it won't hurt the time-space continuum, and Rhys comes to the conclusion that Joe watches too many weird sci-fi movies.) He pops a metaphorical stiffie at the thought of being in a touring band, a band that sells hundreds of thousands of albums and has fans in Japan and South America, and Rhys finds it kind of endearing, honestly. Maybe having to spend a week with this other Joe in his flat wouldn't be so bad.

And as it turns out, it really isn't. Neither for Rhys nor for Joe or the younger Joe.

That's a bit weird, isn't it, thinking of himself with a title like that, as being the younger one. But yeah, even if he's pretty sure that he's the real original Coffin Joe Spurgeon, the older one probably has some rights to being just Joe on account of the fact that he's been here longer, and the fact that he didn't appear out of thin air. Surprisingly, it didn't take that much for Joe to get over that fact, only a good trip and then subsequently waking up hungover on the couch.

Okay, so yesterday he woke up disoriented in a strange flat and then proceeded to almost have a panic attack when the owner of said flat found him, and then almost had another when he realised that owner was Joe – the older one, he means – and when he realised that this was (or is) the future. Then, he propositioned to make out with himself, because that's just a thing you do when you meet a doppelgänger or a future self or something, sexual experimentation, right. Joe has already done weirder things than that. Although he didn't think he'd ever get to a point in life where sharing a flat with Rhys sounds like a good idea.

Still, though, it's not _bad_ , he spends the first two days after the day he arrived either wandering through London or flipping through TV channels while Rhys and older Joe are off recording in the studio. He tries to avoid the news, though, because even if he really won't remember anything once he gets back, he doesn't really want to have the fact that he's in the _future_ thrown in his face, and besides, he'd rather not screw things up in the odd case that he _does_ end up remembering stuff. (Maybe he's seen too many time travel movies.) Also, any and all corners of the city where he could run into someone he knows, or anyone who knows him, because in the future (now) he's got fans, who are probably creepy enough to google what he looked like back before the band blew up.

Friday night, he ends up in a tiny goth club in Camden, where the lights are dim enough and the drinks are cheap. (When he'd mentioned to Rhys and the other Joe that he was thinking about going out, over breakfast consisting of scrambled eggs, bacon, and last night's Chinese leftovers, Rhys had reached into his wallet and pulled out twenty quid, and Joe had stuffed the note into his pocket and mumbled “thanks Mum,” causing older Joe to splutter out half-chewed something all over the back of his hand.) He almost pulls a girl, but then some part of his drunken brain realises that back in 2005, she would have been what, twelve, and that's creepy, so he doesn't pull that girl.

Saturday night, they all go out to the clubs once again, not the same one, obviously, because Joe doesn't want to risk running into Tom or Harry or anyone else who would be able to recognise him, and also, because he reckons that with his black hair and pointy shoes he'd look rather out of place at the club current Joe – there, that works – and Rhys had mentioned. So, he ends up at the same goth club yet again, and once more, with a pretty girl in front of him.

“You know,” the girl shouts over the blaring music after they've danced together for a few minutes, “you look just like Coffin Joe from the Horrors.”

“What? I can't hear you,” Joe replies, even though he heard it perfectly well.

“Coffin Joe from the Horrors,” the girl repeats, “you really look alike.” Then she says, “not now, I mean, back in the day when they were still emo.”

“The Horrors aren't bloody emo,” Joe says. Then, to really cover his tracks, “which one's Joe?”

“He's the drummer.”

“You mean the one that looks like Ian Curtis?” (Honestly, the current one does. Kind of.)

The girl just shakes her head, not really in disagreement. That weird “I can't _believe_ I have to put up with this” head shake that girls – and Rhys – do. They keep dancing, but after a few minutes, the girl pulls back once more and says, “I'm going to tell my friends that I shagged a guy who looks like Coffin Joe.”

“I don't think we're going to have sex,” Joe says. Honestly, he can't really blame her, because they're both drunk, and he knows that himself, he's said some things while sloshed that were bloody _stupid_ , but still, this conversation is beginning to make him rather uncomfortable. Also, there's the fact that the only place he has they can go to is the actual present day Coffin Joe's flat. “Sorry. I've got a girlfriend.” He does. In 2005.

In response to that, the girl shouts something that sounds an awful lot like “you bleeding cunt,” and like that, she's gone.

Joe pushes his way through to the bar to grab another JD and coke, and he ends up going back home fairly soon after that. When he pushes the spare key that Rhys was kind enough to give to him into the lock and opens the door to the flat, it's quiet, the hallway completely dark. Joe closes the door, quietly, and begins to take his shoes off, when he hears the first moan.

Then his own voice, or rather, current Joe's voice, “mm. Tight.” Seems like at least one version of him has managed to bring a girl back.

“Yeah,” Rhys' voice comes a couple of seconds later, “just like that, yeah, please.”

Looks like they've both pulled, then, and Joe figures that he should do the respectful thing and go curl up on his sofa with a blanket and, the next morning, hope neither of their hookups happen across him, and then pretend he didn't hear anything. The living room door turns out to be a bit of a problem with that, though, because it refuses to open, stuck on something. Joe grips the handle a bit tighter in frustration, and pushes, hard, harder, and then it flies open with a sound. A loud, crashing noise, which someone probably heard.

“Fuck.” Someone _definitely_ heard that.

“Shit,” current Joe's voice comes quietly, almost too appropriate. “Did you hear that?”

“Doesn't matter. Why'd you stop?” Rhys' voice replies.

“We shouldn't.” Oh. “Not with me. Him here.”

“Why not?”

“It's weird.”

“Your reaction to finding him was to snog him, how can you say that's weird?”

“Why's it so hard for you to grasp the concept that I don't like having sex when I can hear?”

“You sound schizophrenic,” Rhys says, exasperated. “Why's it so hard for you to just get over it and keep fucking me?”

Now, the thing is, Joe has a bit of a history with being walked in on. He's not even twenty yet and it's happened to him like four times already, not including that incident featuring his older self and Rhys.

Maybe that's the reason why he approaches the door to Joe's room where the noises are coming from, that he'll finally get to be on the other end of this, and, in a weird roundabout way, continue the chain. Or maybe it's that some part of him is clinging on to the thought that his drunken brain is misinterpreting things, that it's not what it sounds like and when he'll open that door, he'll find current Joe twisted in the sheets with some girl.

The point is, Joe opens the door and finds exactly what he expected, which is current Joe on top of Rhys, and also, inside of Rhys.

His first reaction is a very lacklustre “oh.” Then, “well.”

Rhys looks from him to the other Joe who seems to have frozen mid-thrust, which would look funnier if Joe – the time-travelled one, although he supposes it applies to the other one too – wasn't currently on the verge of crying drunk, confused tears. “See, this only happened because you had to make sure your past self doesn't hear us fucking.”

“We wouldn't have had that conversation if you knew how to keep it down,” current Joe counters.

“Well,” Joe says. So that's what being on the other end of this feels like. It feels like being an arsehole. “I'm too drunk right now to properly react to this, so for now I'm going to go away and pretend you two aren't bumming each other.”

–

(Flashback to 2008. They're in the middle of recording the album that would later on become _Primary Colours_ , and they've been holed up in their studio for approximately four days, although a few minutes earlier, the rest of them went off for a cigarette run. Right now, Rhys is spread out on the sticky leather sofa, trousers shoved down to past his arse, and Joe's mouth is on his dick. It's a pretty mouth, all pink and soft and plump, and wrapped around Rhys' cock, it feels like heaven.

“You've a pretty mouth,” Rhys says, and Joe pulls those pretty lips away.

“Thanks,” he says, and presses a messy kiss to the head, “so I've heard.” Maybe neither of them is entirely sober.

Joe sinks down a bit further, flutters his tongue over the slit and strokes the base of Rhys' dick, and Rhys sighs and pets his hair a bit. “You're good at this,” he says, “shouldn't have taken that piercing out, though.”

“You're the one who said it made me look like a cocksucker,” Joe observes, and Rhys thinks that he really shouldn't do that. Talk, that is, when he could be doing better things with that mouth he has.

“Yeah, and look where you are now. Sucking my cock.”

Joe makes an unappealing snorting noise when he laughs, but he goes back to doing what he should be doing, and then he does something with his tongue that makes Rhys rake his nails up the grimy upholstery.

“Mother of fuck.” Joe grins up at him, as good as he can with his mouth full anyway. “Have you ever done that before?”

“Once or twice, maybe.” He strokes a little bit faster, licks at his palm to slick it up, and then says, “must have been drunk.”

Rhys decides to not go with the obvious cocksucker joke. “You're good at it,” he says again, because Joe _is_ , some sort of natural dick sucking talent, maybe. He checks the clock they've got on one wall, it's been six minutes since the other guys left. Three more minutes until they'll be back, most likely. “Should hurry up, though.”

Then Joe does, hurry up, that is. He does that thing with his tongue again and his hand strokes down to caress Rhys' balls, and it doesn't take much longer until Rhys is coming in his mouth, and over his pretty pink lips.

Still, it's a minute too long, because while Rhys is struggling to buckle his belt back up and Joe is wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, the door opens.

“Oh.” It is, again, a rather lacklustre “oh”. Coming from Josh, thankfully enough, and not Faris. (Tom seems like he'd be able to deal with this pretty well after the initial shock, but that's neither here nor there.)

Josh's eyes go from Joe's lovely wet mouth to Rhys' crotch, and Rhys reaches for his jacket, lying on the sofa next to him, and covers himself. Mainly because the thought that one of his heterosexual friends is staring at his dick is kind of disturbing. It's silent for too long, and Rhys hopes that Josh is going to resume functioning like a normal human before Tom and Faris walk in.

Then, thankfully, Josh laughs. Just for a short second, a gross, spluttering laugh, and then he says, sounding surprisingly mature, “well.”

“Well,” Joe repeats. His voice sounds like he's just been fucked in the mouth.

“Well. I'm just going to pretend that I didn't just walk in on you guys fellating each other.”

Rhys makes a face which hopefully conveys both his relief and his general bewilderment at the situation at hand. “Did you just say fellate?”

“It's a good word. Fancy word for blow jobs.”

“I know what fellate means,” Rhys says under his breath. “Did you bring my fags?”

Josh plants himself on the far edge of the couch the furthest away from Rhys and pulls a pack from his jacket pocket.

Two minutes later, when Rhys is smoking outside the studio door and Tom and Faris stop to join him, everything is normal. Five minutes after that, they're back at work, and no one brings up fellatio.)

–

The day that Josh found out, he didn't react. He never really reacted after that, either, maybe because it hadn't really surprised him. At least that's what he said the next time he was having a somewhat serious one-on-one conversation with Rhys, “I mean, I've met best friends who have weird homoerotic tension between them.”

“You and Tom,” Rhys pointed out.

“Yeah, all right. There's weird homoerotic tension best mates like me and Tom, and then there's you two.”

Rhys felt uncomfortably schizophrenic at the notion of being referred to as “you two”, on account of the fact that Joe wasn't even there.

“I just figured it'd be a matter of time until you'd end up shagging each other,” Josh said and shrugged, and Rhys wasn't sure how to feel about that.

The point is, Josh never had an actual reaction to walking in on Joe and Rhys, unless casually dropping dick jokes into conversation counts as reacting. With this other Joe, though, it's different.

The other Joe reacts approximately when they're eating breakfast, which consists of soggy Special K – the one with the berries in – because Rhys is too hangover to bother with cooking and too cranky to want to eat anything cooked by either Joe. Cranky, which sounds like a word that a middle-aged woman with three children would use to describe herself, but that's approximately how Rhys feels, like a middle-aged woman who's trying to get over the fact that one of her kids walked in on mummy and daddy doing the deed. Except it's kind of worse, because he got walked in on by his best mate from seven years ago, who's also the past version of his boyfriend, and now he has to explain that sometimes, a man and a man love each other very much, and sometimes, those two men happen to be Coffin Joe of the Horrors (who spent the first twenty-two years of his life pretty sure that he was straight) and his not quite as heterosexual best mate.

Rhys kind of has the overwhelming urge to drown himself in his cereal just to avoid having that conversation. He's pretty sure that “we'll have to give them the sex talk” is at least in his top three reasons why they're never going to adopt a kid or donate sperm to have one or whatever, not even when they're both over thirty-five and at that age where people usually start wanting kids.

“So,” the younger Joe says after he's shovelled a spoonful of Special K into his mouth and thoughtfully chewed it a couple of times. “You guys are shagging, then.” He says it in a very matter-of-fact way, in the same matter-of-fact way you'd inform someone that the toilet is overflowing. Now that's a gross metaphor.

“Going out,” the normal Joe says, and Rhys nods.

“Oh.” This one's not quite as lacklustre, and then younger Joe says, “and why?”

That's probably the most uncomfortable question he could ask, the one that makes it obvious that he's more than perplexed by this all. Rhys stares into his milk with the soggy cornflakes and bits of freeze-dried raspberry floating in it and has to bite back the desire to disappear into thin air. After a few seconds, when he's managed to somewhat deal with this whole situation, he says, “because we love each other.” He feels like his own mum.

“I figured as much. I mean, when did you...?” Young Joe starts, and Rhys would feel sorry for him, all uncomfortable and confused, if he wasn't busy feeling sorry for himself for being uncomfortable and confused as to why this kind of thing always happens to _him_.

Normal Joe looks back at him, with a look on his face that seems to say “go ahead,” because between the both of them, Joe is the expert on time travel and the whole continuum. That is not a sentence which Rhys thought would ever cross his mind.

“When we were recording the second album.” Rhys reaches for his cup of coffee and stirs it for probably the twentieth time before he sips it, and then says, “it just kind of happened, I don't know.” He's had this conversation at least four times, and he dreads it more every time.

The other Joe nods. He looks around as wrecked as Rhys feels, hair still sleep-messy and kohl liner smudged around his eyes and on his cheeks. “What about Harry?”

“We had an amicable breakup,” Joe says, before Rhys can even think about the question properly. “We're still good friends, so.” He pauses to sip his tea, and then adds, “was a bit weird having to tell her that I fancy her brother, though.” And he laughs, just for a short second before his hangover seems to catch up with him, and that thought is rather satisfying for Rhys. This is one of Joe's favourite stories to tell, for some reason, but Rhys doesn't find it all that funny. The thought that he's sleeping with his sister's ex mostly just makes him uncomfortable, so he makes a point of avoiding it. That's basically incest, isn't it.

Time to change the topic to something slightly less uncomfortable. “Faris was pissed, though.”

“Yeah,” Joe agrees and stares down into his bowl of cereal. This is one of his least favourite stories, which is reasonable, since Rhys isn't all that fond of it either. It ought to be brought up while they're breaching the subject, though.

“He ended up writing at least three songs about it.”

The only reason Rhys likes telling this one is because of other Joe's reaction. It takes a few split seconds, maybe because of the hangover, but then he nearly chokes on his cereal. “Wait,” he says, his face turning that unattractive blotchy red that Joe's face gets whenever he's really shocked about something, “Faris is gay too?”

“Wouldn't say gay,” current Joe says. “He used to really fancy Rhys, that's all.”

“Fancy's a nice way of putting it,” Rhys butts in. “He wanted to tie me up in his basement so he could have me all for himself.”

It's technically the truth, but Rhys enjoys the expression on the younger Joe's face all the same. “Did he tell you that?”

“Well, no, but you know how Faris is.”

“Well,” younger Joe says. “I think I'll go out today. Can you do me a favour and put a sock on the door or something so I don't walk in on you shagging again?”

–

And Joe does. Go out, or rather, he goes to one of those overpopulated coffee shops full of tourists and teenagers and orders a massive mug of hot chocolate – with whipped cream and hazelnut flavour and all that. He doesn't remember that kind of thing from 2005. This really is the future.

Joe sits down in a plush-upholstered chair at a table occupied by a gaggle of girls, and he waits until his mug has cooled down enough to drink, and he thinks.

Now, Joe is not the type of person who thinks a lot. He mostly just rolls with things as they happen, so this is basically new land for him. If he does think about it, though, he's always been pretty sure that he's straight. He likes girls. Harry. He's into long silky hair and curvy hips and voluptuous thighs and full lips. Breasts. Sex with girls, fingering girls. All that. Well, there was this one time way back when he was fourteen and had just discovered porn on the internet, when he was watching a buffering-stuttering video of some blonde with a dick in her mouth and ended up coming to the mental image of sucking a cock, rather than getting his sucked. But that was when he was fourteen and perpetually horny and he's pretty sure around the same time he once came while he was thinking about pizza, so Joe's not sure if that alone counts as an argument for him having a deeply repressed bisexual side. Okay, there was also that time last year when he saw _The Man Who Fell To Earth_ because Rhys made him and then had two nights worth of very vivid dreams about sex with a young David Bowie, but to be fair, Joe is pretty sure that everyone secretly wants to give Bowie a blowie. Rhys' wording, not his.

Or maybe he's being too logical about this, because sexuality is really weird and fluid, after all, but on the other hand, that's Rhys' words, again, and Rhys is a huge slag.

Joe takes a sip of his expensive hot chocolate and leans back in his chair. He's pretty sure that out of all the problems he's been told to expect later in life, none of them are remotely related to discovering that in the future, he's kind of gay and shagging his best mate. Speaking of which, Joe is pretty sure that if he was gay – or bisexual or whatever – he'd have better taste in men than that. Not that he doesn't like Rhys, but honestly. Rhys is kind of a tit. A massive tit. Also, he has a really weird looking mouth and Joe is pretty sure that if he ever went out with Rhys he'd always be second best to some rare single. Actually, he's also pretty sure that Rhys has whacked off to his favourite records before.

Joe spends at least five hours in that coffee shop, ordering another hot chocolate after the first one is gone and then another. Not like the stuff even tastes especially good, but still, he doesn't want to go back to the flat before he's reasonably sure that current Joe and Rhys will have returned from the studio.

He feels a bit weird being in the flat all by himself. Not because they're gay or anything, but it's oddly creepy, like he's spying in on his future self's life. Okay, maybe just a little because they're gay.

When he does take the tube back to the flat, he finds his older self dancing to Blur in the living room with Rhys and briefly wonders whether he's always been kind of bad at dancing or whether he's gotten worse at it. When the two of them notice him standing there, they spring apart for a short second, but then Joe figures he might as well join in, so he does, and it's only a little bit weird.

The next morning, after they'd gotten the whiskey out yet again and spent the better part of their evening dancing to Rhys' collection of cheesy 90s records, Joe wakes up with a buzzing head and finds current Joe sitting on the kitchen table, Rhys standing between his legs and leaning up to press their mouths together. Again, when Joe walks in and grabs the kettle from the counter, they pull away from each other with rather embarrassed looks on their faces.

Joe says, “knock it off, you're acting like I've never seen gay sex before,” and looks back at them. Because, really. He's been best mates with Rhys for over two years. Ten years, technically. Joe fucking hates time travel. The point is, they're making a way too big deal about the fact that they're shagging each other. That in the future, he's shagging Rhys. So that's a thing that's happening. So.

–

Later that day, Rhys is preparing dinner – pasta, with home made sauce – and young Joe is sitting at the kitchen table flipping through some magazine. He's not quite sure where current Joe has fucked off to, and honestly, Rhys is still kind of mad at him for what he said this morning, and last evening, and pretty much every time before that, so he doesn't exactly care. Joe's been ridiculously insistent that they can't have sex with his past self in the flat, which is both a bit overblown, because it's not like younger Joe doesn't know now, as well as completely ridiculous and unfair. Rhys _likes_ having sex, dammit. And it's not like Joe particularly minds when they've got anyone else over. Or when they're staying the night at someone else's flat. Like that time at Tom's flat, in the bathroom, which was probably the best sex they'd had in a long while, because Rhys _knows_ that Joe gets off on the thrill of possibly being walked in on.

God, Rhys has got to stop thinking about sex. He's beginning to feel deprived.

(Really, he has half a mind to just grab a dildo from Joe's collection and get off that way. Maybe the big thick one that's that ugly neon shade of green, yes. That would make him less sexually frustrated and also sufficiently piss Joe off. It still wouldn't be the same as actual sex, though, so probably not.)

Rhys decides to get back to slicing the tomato in front of him into tiny cube-shaped pieces and he's mostly done with that when younger Joe speaks.

“Hey, Rhys? How did you know you're gay?”

When Rhys almost cuts his thumb, he decides to blame it on the fact that he'd almost forgotten young Joe was even there, and not on the question itself. He's pretty smooth at making it look like nothing happened, though, he reckons. “Bisexual.”

“Right.” He doesn't miss the sarcasm in young Joe's voice. “How do you know you like dick, then?”

For a second, Rhys has to ponder the question. He shrugs. “I don't know how to describe it. It's just something you know.”

“That's the worst answer to that question you could give.”

Rhys turns around and looks Joe in the face. He's pouting a little bit, and it's almost cute. There's something cute about sexually confused goth teenagers.

“Why're you asking anyway?”

“Well. Since I'm shagging you in the future. Now. And I figure I can't really fuck up anything in the continuum, since I'm in the future, and this has all happened, and...” This is roughly the part when Joe stops being sure what he's trying to say, so instead he just makes vague hand gestures that don't look like much of anything.

Rhys nods to show that he understands. He pulls a chair out from the table and takes a seat.

“I guess I'm just trying to figure out how it all happened. I mean, I never really thought about being into guys.”

“Yeah.” This is, in an interesting twist, not the first time that Rhys has had to deal with a sexually confused Joe, and just like back then, he's not sure what to say. Himself, he's been very aware of the fact that he likes men pretty much since he hit puberty, so he's never actually had time to question it.

“You're not being very helpful,” younger Joe points out.

“I've known that I like dick for more than half my life, what do you expect?”

Now Joe is the one who shrugs. “Someone who's more helpful.” It's both a very accurate and a very stupid reply.

“Sorry.” Rhys wants to get up and get back to his cooking, but then, he'd feel like a twat if he just left Joe to deal with all this sexual confusion by himself. “You can let it out, I guess. Tell me all about your problems.”

“You sound like my mum.”

“You sound like my sexually confused son,” Rhys counters. He lets that sink in for a second and then adds, “that's really creepy.”

Young Joe laughs and it sounds exactly like current Joe's laugh. “I guess that's all there is to it, I just wanted to know. You guys seem really into each other, so.”

“We are.” Rhys can't help but smile, probably more than he needs to. He really does love Joe a lot, and okay, sometimes he just has to take a deep breath and take it all in. Maybe that's stupid and sappy, but then, Rhys has always been a bit of a sap.

Young Joe smiles back at him, in that stupid closed-mouthed way that he does and always has. He really hasn't changed at all in the past eight years. “I talked to him earlier today, you know. Me, I mean.” Rhys maintains that there's got to be a more elegant way to discuss this time travel issue. “And he said we're engaged now.”

“We are,” Rhys says once again, and he wants to cringe at himself for being so repetitive.

–

(For the record, they got engaged sometime last year. They're in Spain, because Rhys had a DJ set earlier that night, and Joe tagged along just because. After, late when they're both post-sex tired, but still too high to sleep and their hotel room too hot and sticky, they're just lying there in the sweaty sheets, Rhys listening to Joe's soft breath and the cars outside, when Joe nudges him and says, “hey. We should get married.”

It takes a second to really sink in. “What?”

“Yeah.” Joe turns to give him a smile, the big one with teeth that he only pulls out when he's really excited about something. “We don't have to make it official or make it a big deal. I just think we should be married.”

Rhys contemplates it for a split second. “Why not.” He throws one arm around Joe and moves in closer for a moment, but. “Ew, you're all warm.”

“Sorry?” Joe laughs and Rhys can feel it in his side where they're still pressed together. He doesn't really want to move away.

“I wouldn't mind being married,” he says after a moment. He's never thought about it before, not before Joe brought it up, but it doesn't sound like that bad an idea. They've been living together for over two years, so it wouldn't even make that much of a difference. Not like having kids or getting a cat or whatever. But having a piece of paper that says it's official and a reception would be nice. “We could make it official once it's legal.”

“It's not legal?” Joe asks.

“It's not.” Rhys pushes the duvet further down his torso and Joe pulls it back up. Sometimes Rhys really cannot stand his habit of bundling up no matter how inhumanly hot it is outside.

“Then we'll just get married when it is.”

“Yeah.” Rhys thinks for a second and says, “I could wear a dress.”

“You could.”

“And garters.” Maybe that's pushing it. “And crotchless panties.” That's definitely pushing it.

“What, you mean at the wedding?”

“After.”

In the little light that's coming in through the window, Joe is smiling again. “Okay. We're getting married, and for our wedding night, you're wearing crotchless panties.”

“It's a deal.”

Joe moves in closer and drapes himself all the way over Rhys. He's too warm and sticky with sweat and other fluids and it's disgusting, really, but also nice.

“I need a shower.”

“Take a shower.”

Rhys pauses for a second to check the red letters of the alarm clock on the bedside. “It's three in the morning.”

“So?”

So then Rhys takes a shower at three in the morning, and when he gets back, Joe is wrapped in the sheets and asleep, so he lies down on the empty half of the bed and sleeps as well.

The next morning, or rather noon, when they're in a rush to pack their stuff, Joe doesn't bring up getting married again, and Rhys figures that maybe that was just another weird post-sex out of it conversation they had. Some days later, though, when they're back in London, he gets home to find that Joe got them delivery pasta from the fanciest place in the area (and he's kind enough to pretend that Joe actually cooked it himself, because that's how things work between them by now) and bought two rings, sleek and silver, and this time, when Joe asks, he says, “yeah. Why shouldn't I want to marry you?”)

–

That's not the point, though. The point is that right now, Joe is sitting at the kitchen table with Rhys, and sometime in the future. Present. Fucking time travel. The point is, they're engaged now, and that's a lot to take in.

“That's scary.”

“Not really,” Rhys says and shrugs, “it's just something we are.”

“It's a lot to take in. The knowledge that in the future, I like men enough that I want to marry one.”

“You know what I've always said about this, right?”

“Yeah, it's fluid.” Joe prods the magazine page in front of him with one finger, mostly to have something to do with his hands. “But I figured that was just one of your lines you use to pull straight guys.”

“Even if it was, it worked on you.”

Joe is kind of perplexed by that reply. For a few seconds, he doesn't know what to say, so he just stares at Rhys' hands. He's got nice hands, actually. All dainty and soft like a girl's, but with long, strong fingers and ridges of veins on the backs of them. Good at hand jobs, too, Joe knows that because Rhys has been his best mate for so long that they tell each other about their hookups in great detail, and this one time when Rhys broke up with this guy after eight months, Joe was there to let him cry on his shoulder and tell him that he'll find the guy who's right for him one day. That's a memory that, considering everything, just got really weird.

Well.

“Can we try it?” Way to go. Joe's not sure where that suddenly came from.

“Try what?”

“Kiss.” Yeah, that sounds good. “I mean, I'm going to be kissing you a lot in the future apparently.”

For a second, Rhys just stares at him, and really, Joe cannot blame him. The whole situation is kind of absurd from an objective point of view, after all. But then Rhys' face softens, and he gets pretty the way he does when he smiles, with dimples and crinkling eyes and all that.

“Why not.”

His one hand reaches out to cover Joe's, and then he's leaning in, so close that Joe can see all the little imperfections in his face, can watch his eyelashes flutter shut. Like that, Joe isn't sure what to do any more, because the odd few times Joe had kissed blokes before, he was a lot more drunk and it was a lot less on purpose. At least Rhys does know what to do, though, his other hand goes to the back of Joe's neck, and then they're kissing and Joe shuts his eyes and rolls with it.

Really, it's not all that different from kissing a girl. Rhys is gentle, chapstick-soft lips and a wet tongue that only laps at Joe's mouth a little bit. If it weren't for the bit of stubble under Joe's hand, where he figured that he should maybe put it on Rhys' cheek to not seem like a twat, it would be exactly like kissing a girl.

After a few seconds, they pull apart, and Rhys smiles at him, that smile he gets when he's trying not to laugh at something. Also, when he's waiting for Joe to say something.

So Joe says, “that wasn't bad.”

“Not bad,” Rhys repeats.”

“I'd say it was actually pretty good.”

“It was.” Rhys gives him a proper smile, now, and gets up, and goes back to his cooking.

And Joe hasn't really found a solution at all to his sexuality crisis problem.

–

That night, they're lying together in Rhys' bed. That in itself is a bit unusual, because they don't ever sleep in the same bed unless sex is involved. Mainly because Joe snores too much and he's too clingy when it's hot and he insists on stealing all the duvets when it's cold. Still, though, he'd somehow ended up following Rhys into his room, stripping most of his clothes off before getting under the covers, and for a few seconds, Rhys had the fleeting hope that he'd be getting dick tonight.

He's not, though, they're just lying there because it's too hot to fall asleep even by Joe's standards. Everything is sweaty. Rhys' skin feels especially sweaty in the places where he's tucked into Joe's side, but the bed is too small for him to really move away, especially given the fact that for a guy who's just as small as he is, Joe takes up way too much space on the mattress. There's so much sweat between the both of them that even the air feels sweaty, and the thought of sex is getting less appealing by the minute. Rhys pushes the duvet down to his waist and Joe pulls it up again.

“You're gross,” Rhys complains into the sticky curve of Joe's neck.

“Sorry for liking to not freeze when I sleep.”

“I'm sorry that I have a normal sense of temperature and don't appreciate feeling like I'm being cooked.”

Joe laughs, and Rhys pushes the duvet all the way off himself and onto Joe's chest. That's slightly better, especially when Joe makes a tired-sounding annoyed noise and then wraps himself properly.

“I don't understand how you can sleep like this. It's hot as balls.”

“It's nice and warm,” Joe replies, sounding a bit childish.

“Gross,” Rhys repeats, and sounds just about equally as childish with that. He leans over and kisses Joe, wet and open-mouthed, just because. Mainly because he likes when Joe gets overly defensive over stupid things like his sleeping habits, because then he gets all pouty and immature, and that's, somehow, really cute.

Joe makes a content little sound into the kiss and gets one sweaty arm out of the covers to wrap it around Rhys' neck, but Rhys pushes it away.

“Warm.”

“You're like the ice queen or something,” Joe comments, and Rhys sticks his tongue out at him.

He moves to wrap an arm around Joe's waist, which is a pretty difficult feat, because with the duvet around him, Joe is more or less twice as wide as he would normally be.

For a minute or so, it's silent, then, and Rhys has the desire to crawl back under the covers just so they can complain at each other and argue some more. Ice queen. Really?

“I kissed you earlier today, you know,” he says after a while, and then he realises how awkward that sentence is, so he clarifies, “the younger you, I mean.”

“I kind of figured.”

“Are you mad?”

“Don't see why I would be mad,” Joe says. In the light that's coming in through the window, the sweat on his face is shining, his hair all messed up and sticky. He looks a lot like he does after sex, and that's a thought Rhys tries to push away as quickly as possible. “It's not really cheating, is it?”

“I don't think it is.” Rhys shrugs, and then he kisses Joe once more.

“I'm tired,” Joe says after a moment, half into Rhys' mouth.

“Then go sleep.”

“Can't sleep.”

Rhys has to resist the urge to point out that maybe, Joe would be able to sleep if he didn't insist on burrito-wrapping himself in the covers. “You reckon it would help if we had sex?”

“You know I'm not going to fuck you with me right there,” Joe says, and Rhys thinks to himself that they have got to find a better way to refer to the other Joe.

“Joe,” Rhys insists, because now that he's brought the subject up, he's not going to give up that easily. He pulls the duvet out from where Joe had tucked it under himself, and then rolls over to straddle him. One of his hands tugs on the t-shirt that Joe insisted on keeping on for some reason, and he makes an effort to bat his eyelashes in that way he knows Joe hates, and Rhys whines, “I _need_ sex.”

“Fine.” Joe's hand goes to Rhys' thigh, and honestly, Rhys would have expected him to resist a little bit longer. “I'll give you a hand job if you keep quiet.”

“If I stay really quiet, do I get to fuck you?”

Joe's face is a weird mixture of exasperated and turned on. Rhys is pretty sure he can feel him getting half hard under his arse. “Yeah, okay.”

“You're the best.” Rhys bends down to kiss him again, and Joe flips them both over, pausing for a second to pull his shirt and pants off. Then they're in the exact opposite position as they were moments earlier, and Joe tugs Rhys' cock out of his briefs.

“Where'd you leave the lube?”

So then, Joe rides Rhys and even though he kind of still misses having a dick in his ass, Rhys has to admit it's pretty fucking fantastic. The bedsprings only squeak a little, and Joe is good at staying quiet, and even if younger Joe hears anything, he isn't complaining.

–

They're sitting around the breakfast table. Current Joe is stirring his tea and going through something on his phone, and Rhys has sex hair, which Joe – the younger one – is trying his hardest to not stare at. Not that he really minds, but still, that kind of thing is something you're supposed to ignore.

No one says anything, and Joe spends the next few minutes eating the blueberry pancakes on his plate. Pancakes. Really. Rhys only ever bothers with making fancy breakfast foods when he's in a good mood, which is usually synonymous with him having gotten some last night. They're gay sex pancakes, really, and that's a thought that has always disturbed Joe, although now, a lot less than he reckons it should disturb him.

“Today's Tuesday,” Rhys says after a while, for no apparent reason. Right, it was Wednesday when Joe woke up in their flat, wasn't it. Weird to think he's spent nearly a week in the future now.

“What's that supposed to mean?” current Joe asks.

“Means that it's Tuesday,” Rhys states, very matter of fact, and brings a syrup-dripping piece of pancake up to his mouth. “Tom wanted me to come over because of this synth he bought last week, remember. Said I've got to check it out.”

“Right,” current Joe says and wipes his mouth. “Think I might tag along if you don't mind.”

“I don't mind.”

Joe is beginning to feel a bit left out. He says, and it sounds a bit out of the blue, “I think today's my last day here.”

“What?”

“Well, I got here Wednesday morning. If I'm supposed to get back after a week, then...” He trails off, kind of lamely.

“We should do something for your last night here,” the other Joe suggests.

“Like what?”

“I don't know.”

“We could always drink,” Rhys suggests.

“We drink all the time,” current Joe points out. “That's not something special.”

“I've got acid,” Rhys suggests, “MDMA. Things.”

“Things,” current Joe repeats.

“Sounds great,” Joe says, and, okay, that came out feeling a little weird. Like they're finishing each other's – finishing their own sentences.

That's later though, later. After breakfast and after Tom, and after Joe fills the better part of the day wandering around aimlessly. He still reckons it's kind of weird to stay in the flat all by himself, so he spends a few hours in some Camden shops and almost gets recognised by some girl _again_ , so after that, he takes the tube to Piccadilly and ends up sitting in some crowded fast food place.

Joe buys the biggest, most unhealthy-looking sandwich he can find on the menu, and while he eats that sandwich, he makes a decision. The decision being that, tonight, he's definitely going to sleep with Rhys. Or at least suck him off. Maybe the current Joe, too, because when is he ever going to have the opportunity to have sex with himself again. And yeah, okay, maybe that's not the kind of decision he should be making while he's in the middle of a restaurant eating a burger so big he can barely fit it into his mouth, but he should probably figure this sexual confusion thing all the way out while he's still here. There's a first time for everything, right, and that includes having a dick in his arse. But then, that's, once again, Rhys' words, but still, since this is the future, Rhys must have had a point with that one. Besides, it doesn't actually sound like it'd be that bad. Maybe Joe should just stop thinking about this whole sexuality issue, so he does, and goes back to his burger.

–

Then it's later. Later, and honestly, Joe isn't really sure how it happened, despite the fact that he's not even _that_ out of it, or, well, at least he can still walk properly and see straight, but at one point, they've all ended up in Rhys' room. The bed there is too small, but if they lie sideways, with their feet over the edge, they all fit onto it comfortably.

Okay, maybe at another point, Joe had set the bottle of tequila they had onto the windowsill above his head, the window next to the bed, and said, “I want to kiss you again.”

“Which of us?”

And Joe had looked at Rhys on his left and current Joe on his right and said, “both of you.”

So the point is, right now, Joe has current Joe's hand in his trousers, slowly petting his half-hard dick, and, wow, that's a weird thing to think, that he's ended up with his future self groping him _again_ , and he's got Rhys' lips mashed against his own. Rhys' mouth works slowly, lazy licks at the seam of Joe's own mouth, but it's filthy, in a way, needy, with Rhys' hands holding him down by the shoulders, and that's much hotter than Joe would have ever thought it could be. He still pulls back, though, turns his head and goes back to kissing current Joe. Because, honestly, he's gotten _good_ at kissing in the meantime. And he's got a nice body, too, all pale skin and hard planes, not like Rhys who's ridiculously _soft_ for someone that skinny. Okay, maybe they've also lost their shirts at one point or another.

Joe slides his hands all the way down the other Joe's torso and makes a move to undo his belt buckle, because really, this isn't all that gay, is it. Not that this situation as a whole isn't especially gay, and not that Joe minds, but still, this is more like masturbation than anything. A different angle than wanking, but still, current Joe makes a low, low noise of satisfaction, and honestly, is it wrong to be turned on by his own sex sounds? Joe reckons it shouldn't be. He gets Rhys' hands around his waist, anyway, undoing his trousers further and getting his cock out all the way. Rhys' mouth on his neck, too, and then his teeth, because Rhys likes to bite during sex, apparently, and then he soothes the mark with his tongue and Joe swears he can feel his cock actually twitch.

“Fuck,” Joe whispers after he's pulled back, and, god, his mouth looks _obscene_ like this, all red and swollen and pretty. When he turns his head enough, Rhys has a look on his face like he's never seen anything better before, or maybe like Christmas just came early for him. Joe cannot blame him at all.

“Fuck,” Rhys repeats, and then his hands are on Joe's face, pulling their mouths together once again. “You've got to blow me.”

And yeah, actually, it's not like Joe hasn't considered it, so why not, and he licks into Rhys' mouth and rolls them both over and enjoys the shiver going all the way through Rhys a bit too much. “Why not.”

“Can't believe I never got a blowie off you when you still had that piercing.”

Current Joe laughs, and then he's moving in to kiss Rhys, that kind of passionate borderline pornographic kiss which Joe has never actually seen outside of porn, and, fuck, fuck, fuck. “Fuck,” Joe breathes, and moves off the bed to tug Rhys' jeans and pants down to his thighs.

Rhys' dick is already hard and thick against his stomach, a bit pink with the blood filling it out, and Joe feels it somewhat slick and heated in his hand. He's got Rhys' eyes on him now, too, hooded and blown wide with drunkenness, his face all flushed, and, fuck, Joe isn't sure whether that or the fact that they're both watching him, tracing every little shift of his fingers, the way he wets his lips, whether that's what turns him on the most.

“Are you going to...” Rhys starts, and then trails off, mainly because Joe takes that opportunity to lean forward and fold his lips over the head of Rhys' cock.

He takes a second to take that all in, Rhys' face hovering somewhere above him, all sex-flushed and excited, and the heavy weight of him on his tongue, the taste of skin and salty precome. Then he figures he should maybe do something instead of just sitting there with Rhys' dick in his mouth, so he sucks at it, just a bit, flicks his tongue against the slit, the way he likes it when girls do it. And apparently, that works for Rhys, too, because he gets the nicest little moans for it, that and hands tugging on his hair, just gently.

“Fuck me, you're a natural at this,” Rhys says, low and heavy, and Joe would smile up at him if he didn't have a cock in his mouth.

Older Joe actually smiles and kisses the next few sounds from Rhys' lips, and somehow, that's actually bloody hot. He's got his one hand on Rhys, too, tracing patterns on his skin while his other hand's working his own cock, and if thinking that, in the future, he grows up to be really hot is wrong, then Joe does not want to be right. He takes Rhys' cock in about as deeply as it will go without choking him, tightens his hold on Rhys' hip to make sure he won't try to fuck his mouth, and the sound that he gets for that borders on pornographic, long and low and running down his spine, and, wow.

“You used to be so pretty,” Rhys says, the next time he manages to make proper words, and he's talking to the other Joe, this time. “Such a little goth twink.”

“Don't call me twink,” older Joe insists.

Joe pulls his mouth from Rhys' cock for a second and says, “I'm no twink.” Really, he's only got a vague understanding of what the word twink even means, but he's pretty sure he's not one.

“Can't believe it took me five bloody years until I pulled you,” Rhys states, his voice still so heavy, and it's weird in a sexy way.

“You talk way too much, you know that,” older Joe says. “I can't believe you spent five bloody years not trying to pull me.” He presses his mouth all the way onto Rhys', and Joe takes that as his cue to get back to what he was doing.

It doesn't take that long, maybe two minutes or three, when Joe's mouth is already beginning to feel sore, until Rhys comes, with an incoherent little string of words that's all, “pull off pull off fuck gonna come, fuck,” and then he does, all over Joe's chin with a soft little noise. Joe doesn't come, but he bloody well feels like he could, his dick straining hard inside his pants. Why the fuck is he still wearing pants?

“Fuck,” Rhys breathes, and Joe wipes his face on the back of his hand.

Other Joe's watching him with eyes blown so wide all the blue is gone from them, and then he asks, “are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Joe confirms, voice hoarse, and other Joe reaches out to pull him back between them, but not before he's finally managed to get his pants and trousers off.

He pulls his older self into a messy kiss, and briefly wonders if his mouth tastes of cock, and then turns around to kiss Rhys as well.

“What do you want?” Rhys asks. “What do you want to do now?”

Joe looks down at Rhys' cock and takes it in his hand, feels it slowly thicken again, and he doesn't have to think for a long time.

“You should fuck me.”

–

(Because it bears mentioning, the very first time Rhys has sex with Joe, real actual sex that isn't limited to quick hand jobs when no one else is occupying the studio or dry humping and blowies on Rhys' saggy couch because it's too hot outside and they're too out of it to do anything else, it's after a DJ set.

There's, okay, there's no sugar-coating it, they're both sloshed, probably too sloshed to fuck, but right now, Rhys is too horny to just be satisfied by having Joe suck him off. He's reasonably sure that Joe feels the same, because as soon as they've slammed the door to Rhys' flat shut, probably too loudly, he's got Joe's hands on his arse, and his mouth on Joe's neck, and on his jaw and his lips and, okay, time to take a breath.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” Joe says back, his mouth already all pretty and pink. Rhys doesn't think he'll ever get over how much he likes that mouth. “Bedroom?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure.” Rhys leans forward to kiss that mouth again, and somehow, they make it to the bedroom.

They don't have time for fooling around, not when Rhys has a raging semi in his pants, which he might have had since the cab ride because sometimes Joe is a tease who likes to whisper filthy things in Rhys' ear while they're waiting in line for the coat check. Rhys would hate Joe for that, but not right now, maybe later, because right now, he's got Joe naked underneath him, all gorgeous and hard, flat planes. There's friction, too, good friction, but right now, it's not enough.

“Can I fuck you?”

Rhys is almost surprised by how dirty his voice comes out, but then, he guesses it's only appropriate given the subject matter.

“Yeah, yeah, of course.”

It's not entirely new, Rhys had fingers inside Joe before, while jerking him off or blowing him, but still, when he checks the drawer with the condoms and other things, there's a sad lack of lube in it. Probably because it's been months since Rhys last got any dick, before Joe, because finding someone to hook up with is near impossible when he's in a touring band and doesn't want to have the news that he's bisexual on the internet the next day, because wow, no. The point is, he's out of bloody lube, so spit will have to do.

Joe makes a face when Rhys gets the first finger in, but he goes “keep going keep going keep going _yes that's the spot_ ” when Rhys hits his prostate. When he adds another finger, and then another one, Joe bites the flesh of his own arm, but the sounds that slip from him are some mix of pain and pleasure, and it's hot as fuck.

“Will you just put it in me already,” Joe groans after a minute or two of three fingers.

That's when Rhys has his mouth on his dick, because it's right there and looking all pretty and pink and excited, but he pulls back to ask, “are you sure?”

“Fuck, just put it in,” Joe says once again, and they still don't have any lube, so Rhys just spits in his hand a couple of times until he figures it's enough to slide in smoothly.

“Fucking hell. Ow.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, shit.” Joe bites his lip and trails one hand down his stomach to grasp his cock. “Keep going.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Ow, fuck.” Joe makes the worst hissing noise and Rhys is legitimately horrified.

“You want me to stop?”

“No, no, come on, just keep fucking me. It'll be better.”

“You sure?”

“Ow. Yeah, yeah.”

Yeah, the point is, there's no sugar-coating it, their first time having actual sex is awful. Rhys has to pull out after two minutes because he's terrified of seriously hurting Joe, and then gets them both off with his hands, which is ridiculously dissatisfying.

The day after, Rhys goes out to the store to buy lube as soon as he feels not completely dead, and Joe spends the next couple of days walking funny. They make it a rule to never, ever bring it up.)

–

And, okay, the point is, Rhys is almost entirely not freaked out at all when younger Joe asks him to fuck him. He's maybe been thinking about it. Maybe since he came to terms with the fact that a nineteen year old Joe just randomly appeared in his living room one day and no, he's not going insane.

Hell, he's thought about fucking nineteen year old Joe even way back when Joe was nineteen the first time, and okay, maybe he does like them young, what of it.

Instead of saying any of that, though, Rhys just breathes, can smell the sex on Joe's face, his own smell, and kisses him again. “Yeah,” he says, “I'll fuck you all right.”

He can taste himself in younger Joe's mouth, too heavy and intense, and younger Joe wraps his legs around his waist and fucking sighs, sexy and shallow with how fast his breath is going.

“Where's the lube?” Rhys asks, and the other Joe, the main one, hands it to him.

“Looks like you're taking my arse virginity again, then?”

Rhys chooses to ignore that comment, because really, how do you even respond to that kind of thing, so instead, he slicks his fingers up and presses the first one against the younger Joe's opening. Careful, gentle, and then he starts pushing it in and Joe leans over to swallow all the little moans coming from the younger Joe's mouth. That's, yeah, that's probably the greatest thing Rhys has ever seen in his life, and he doesn't waste much time with getting Joe open. Yeah, he's still careful, of course, because he doesn't want Joe's very first gay experience to go horrible. Still, it doesn't take long until he's got three fingers deep inside Joe, crooking them to nudge his prostate, and Joe's just moaning, deep in his throat, and right into what's technically his own mouth.

Honestly, Rhys has never really thought about that weird sexual fantasy most guys seem to have, about having sex with identical twins or whatever, because that always just seemed kind of _weird_ to him. Now, though, watching the two Joes getting wrapped up in each other, somehow so, so similar despite the eight years of age difference and the black hair dye and smudged kohl liner on the younger one, he's got to admit that it's pretty fucking sexy.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Rhys says, and then has to laugh at how oddly appropriate that phrase seems.

The Joes pull apart, and the older one asks, “what d'you mean by that?”

“You're really hot. Both of you.”

Older Joe smirks, and younger Joe gives this sort of shy smile that makes it even more obvious that he's never done anything like this before, that only makes this more exciting, and Rhys just really wants to kiss both of them at once. He settles for kissing the older Joe first, then the younger Joe, still tastes traces of precome in his mouth, feels that fucking tongue ring press hard against his own tongue, and honestly, why did Joe ever have to take that thing out?

“Are you going to fuck me now?” young Joe asks, some mix of excited and nervous, and instead of replying, Rhys runs his lube-slick hand down his dick and pushes in.

And then. Okay. The first thing Rhys pays attention to is Joe's face, the way his eyes go wide and glazed-over, and the noise he bites back and how tightly his fingers curl into the back of Rhys' neck.

“Okay?”

“Holy fuck,” Joe, the older one whispers, and judged by the look on his face, the younger one feels about the same.

Rhys leans down to kiss him, soft and careful just to settle him down, strokes over Joe's thighs and goes, “okay?” again.

This time, he gets an answer, “yeah, okay.”

“How's this feel?” and Rhys rocks his hips just a bit, tight, tight and slick and wonderful and Joe worries his lip again.

“Yeah. Yeah, all right.” Joe's mouth falls open on a moan and Rhys feels the need to kiss it again, and to reach down and grasp Joe's cock, squeeze his fingers over Joe's own. “Good.”

“Can I go faster?”

Joe makes a sound that could be a yes, that is most definitely a yes, and Rhys begins to speed up his thrusts, just a little, until he's at a normal pace and Joe groans low in his throat. The groans just keep coming, shaky and eager and almost not pained, and Rhys would kiss them away, but Joe, the older one, is faster than he is, covering Joe's – his own mouth with his lips, and Rhys has to turn his eyes away from that sight because, really. Joe. Blow job lips. Two pairs of them. Fucking hell.

“Rhys?” Joe, the main one, slots his fingers into the back of Rhys' hair, forces their mouths together, and Rhys can tell how far gone he is from that alone, from the push of his tongue past the line of his teeth and how his nails scratch softly. “You've got to let me fuck you.”

And, fuck, “yeah,” and that hand goes down Rhys' spine, squeezes his arse, and all he can say to that is, “please.”

“Yeah, please,” the younger Joe repeats, and Rhys' brain is virtually crackling, white noise like he's having difficulties with taking in how great this all is, and then Joe's behind him, slick fingers pressing onto his hole, and that's the point where he just stops trying to think about it at all.

–

Later that night, when they're done, Rhys falls asleep with the duvet pulled up to his chin, sandwiched between the two Joes, and even when he's all gross with sweat and lube and come, he's too fucked out to actually complain about the heat.

He wakes up in the morning with only one Joe, the current one, next to him, and his head buzzes like it does after a bad trip.

“Morning.”

“Hey. Looks like I went back to where I belong.” Joe rolls over a little ways to press a kiss to Rhys' mouth, and then he says, “don't think anything's different.”

“Me neither.”

Joe makes a content little sound and drapes himself further over Rhys, which is kind of gross because there's a dried puddle of sticky come on Rhys' lower stomach and it's beginning to stick them together. “You want to know what's weird?”

“What?”

“I just remembered, before we started going out, I had at least one wet dream about a three way with you and another guy.”

“What d'you mean by that?”

“Don't know.” Joe laughs. “But you're talking to a time traveller, so.”

Rhys reckons he's too hungover to be having this conversation and Joe is making too little sense. “Shut up. Let's go back to sleep.”

And yeah, then they do, and when Rhys wakes up again slightly less hungover, the whole memory of the past week seems like a bad trip.

–

Some weeks later, Rhys enters the living room one morning to find a sleeping Spider Webb with smudgy eyeliner and messy hair curled up on the sofa. He's not really all that perplexed.


End file.
